The West missed its chance to help Ukraine

Yet another east European tragedy is unfolding before our eyes. We have watched this movie for more than 80 years. In 1938, Czechoslovakia was abandoned to its fate by Neville Chamberlain at ‘Munich’. In 1945, at the Yalta conference, it was Poland’s turn — and the eastern half of our continent lost to Soviet domination. Then the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968, followed in 1981 by a ‘state of war’ in Poland. ‘Goodbye to all that’ we naively thought after the end of the Cold War, but in 2008, Vladimir Putin’s Russia seized chunks of Georgia. Then came 2014: the Russian dictator annexed Crimea from Ukraine and orchestrated armed rebellion in those easternmost parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk provinces which, on Monday this week, he effectively made a part of Russia. 2014 was the turning point at which the West failed to turn. A low-intensity armed conflict has been going on in those regions for eight years now, with more than 14,000 dead, but we in the rest of Europe have kidded ourselves that we can carry on as usual.